One of Pekin’s more recent downtown businesses is a café and gift shop called Maddie Mae’s at 522 Court St. The café and gift shop, which is open Wednesdays to Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. (lunchroom open on those days until 2 p.m.) has been owned and operated for about two years by Mary L. Haynes, who asked me to investigate the history of her building and the succession of businesses that have operated from that location.
The best known business of 522 Court St. is one that was loved by generations of Pekinites and is missed by many: Maurie’s, a name that encompassed not only a candy store but also the Pekin News Agency and a paperback bookstore known as Maurie’s Book-A-Rama.
Haynes acknowledges that the memory of Maurie’s rightly casts a long shadow. “It has been a lot harder than what I would ever have imagined to start a new business inside a building that formerly housed an iconic business that was so loved by the community,” she said. “When we opened our doors, people came in thinking that they would be walking back into Maurie’s. Most have been very understanding and patient with us, but there were a few that couldn’t understand that we were not Maurie’s.”
Though Maddie Mae’s is different from Maurie’s, Haynes says she strives to honor the Maurie’s legacy.
“We also now have the honor of selling some of Maurie’s homemade treats,” said Haynes. “As you know, Maurie’s was sold to a place in Eureka . . . that has now closed. But the manager of that business bought the business of Maurie’s (name, equipment and recipes), and she approached us with bringing her product in to us and sell, which has been great. Her name is Angie and she is from Metamora, and she was great in allowing [the “Save Pekin’s History” group] to bring the iconic sign back to our building – we are just housing it. Our goal is listening to former Maurie’s customers share their memories with us, and hoping that their families will be able to make new memories with Maddie Mae’s.”
[Note: Debbi Reed-Montgomery of Save Pekin’s History offers the clarifying corrective that “the person who bought the recipes didn’t have rights to the sign. The training site is who I bought the sign from.“]
We’ll return to the story of Maddie Mae’s further on, but turning now to the history of the Maddie Mae’s/Maurie’s building, what we first discover is that 522 Court St. is in fact two separate buildings that have been remodeled to function as a single building.
The Tazewell County Assessor’s website says the buildings at 522 Court St. (left) and 522½ Court St. (right) were both constructed in 1930. However, judging from what we can learn from Pekin city directories and old Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, it appears that the original construction of the 522 Court St. building may have been around 1916, with perhaps a major remodeling in or about 1930. Meanwhile, the 522½ Court St. building was constructed later, perhaps in the 1930s or 1940s.
On the 1909 Sanborn map of Pekin the lot at 522 Court St. is all but empty, but on the 1916 Sanborn map a building housing a wallpaper and paint store is shown at that address. The 1916 building outline seems to cover about half the area of the current Maddie Mae’s building – and a 9 July 2011 Pekin Daily Times report refers to the Maurie’s building as being about 100 years old, which would place its construction during the 1910s. Early Pekin city directories do not list any businesses or persons at 522 Court St. The 1914 city directory as well as prior directories do not have listings for 522 Court St., but the fact that the 1916 Sanborn map shows a building there helps us narrow down that building’s construction to the years from 1914 to 1916.
The 1922 Pekin city directory says the wall paper and paint business that the 1916 Sanborn map shows at 522 Court St. was Pekin Decorating Co., owned and operated by William F. Schaefer (1867-1947) and Julius John “Jule” Henrichs (1878-1963), selling wall paper, paints, varnishes, glass windshields and other materials. The building also had an upstairs office, where James Haines & Son Insurance was then located. James Haines (1856-1929) was the son of James Michael Haines (1822-1909), a notable pioneer businessman of Pekin, a younger brother of Pekin co-founder William Haines (1801-1834) and of inventor Jonathan Haines (1808-1868).
The 1924 directory has the same listing for this address as the 1922 directory, but in the 1926 city directory we find that the plumbing business of Frederick “Fred” York (1877-1941) had replaced Pekin Decorating Co. York’s Plumbing Co. remained at 522 Court St. until the 1930 city directory, which also listed the Izaak Walton League sharing the building, with George E. Larison Collections and Homer A. Cooper listed at 522½ Court St. This secondary address appears to be 522 Court St.’s upstairs space, not the east half of today’s 522 Court St.
In the 1932 city directory, we find that York’s Plumbing Co. has been succeeded by a grocery store run by Albert J. Pitts (1874-1966). As for the secondary address of 522½ Court, from 1932 to 1939 it is listed in the directories as “vacant,” and after 1939 we no longer find a listing for 522½ Court for a few years. It could be that the building at 522 Court had been remodeled in the early 1930s to remove the upstairs business space at 522½ Court. Whatever the case, from then until 1943 we find only 522 Court St. listed in Pekin city directories.
Albert J. Pitts’ grocery store is found in both the 1932 and 1934 city directories. In the 1937 directory, however, we find that the grocery store had become a saloon operated by Ernest Albert Becker (1893-1977). The 1939 directory says that Becker’s saloon had become a liquor store. Becker’s store disappears after that and is not listed in the 1941 city directory, which has no listing for 522 Court St. at all (though the home of Becker and his wife Mildred is listed in that directory). It appears that the business temporarily closed and the 552 Court St. building was vacant at the time.
However, beginning with the 1943 city directory, we find that Becker had reopened his business under the name of Becker’s Court Buffet, a tavern occupying the building at 522½ Court St., on the east side of 522 Court St. The Court Buffet continues to appear in Pekin city directories until 1963, after which Becker retired.
It is not until 1943 that our survey of Pekin city directories finally reveals the beloved name of “Maurie’s” at 522 Court St., though the business popularly known by that name in fact first appears under a different name in the 1930 city directory, over a decade before the year (1941) that has been commonly reported as the date when the business first opened.
“Maurie,” as a great many current and former Pekinites still fondly recall, was Maurice Benjamin Smith (1910-1991), proprietor of Maurie’s Candies and the Pekin News Agency, which was a very popular downtown newsstand. Maurie was not the founder of the business, however, but was in fact the second proprietor of the Pekin News Agency, which first appears in the 1930 city directory as the Pekin News Co., when it was located at 109 N. Fourth St. and owned and operated by Alva Ballard Howland (1881-1940).
The 1934 Pekin city directory shows that Howland had moved his business – listed as the Pekin News Co. and the Karmelkorn Shop confectionary – to 11 N. Fourth St., and Howland’s newsstand and Karmelkorn shop again appears at that address in 1937. In the 1939 directory, Howland’s business is shown to have moved to 9 N. Fifth St.
That is where this business was located when Maurie acquired it following Howland’s death in 1940, and also where it is listed in the 1941 Pekin city directory. Maurie moved into the vacant 522 Court St. building in or soon after that year, and he continued to operate his successful business from that building until his death in 1991. Thus, contrary to common reports, 1941 was not the original founding of the business, but rather apparently when Maurie Smith moved it to 522 Court St.
Along the way, Maurie learned the art of candy-making, and also bought Ernest Becker’s Court Buffet when Becker retired, expanding into the former tavern space in 522½ Court St. The 1965 city directory is when Maurie’s Book-A-Rama first appears at that address, while Becker is listed in that directory as retired.
Haynes said, “Maurie bought a candy store from someone else that had one in the Arcade Building. Per Maurie’s daughter, Meta, Maurie didn’t start making candy until he was 51 years old.”
Maurie passed away 2 Aug. 1991 and was buried in Peoria Hebrew Cemetery in West Peoria, but his widow Bess and daughter Cheri (Smith) (Mandell) Diamond kept the store going until 1996. On 1 March 1996, the Smith family sold the business to a Pekin police officer named R. Dean Bacon (1951-2009) and his wife Ann Bacon, who traveled to Cheri’s shop, Maurie’s Fine Chocolates, in Madison, Wis., so Cheri could train them in candy-making. The Bacons ran the store until Dean’s sudden death on 2 Nov. 2009. His widow Ann carried on the business for a short while, but on 13 Dec. 2010 she sold Maurie’s and the building at 522 and 522 ½ Court St. to Scot Johannes.
Johannes carried out some needed renovations and repairs on the building, and also made the difficult decision in June 2012 to take down the iconic Maurie’s Candies neon sign that had grown old with rust. He intended to have the sign refurbished and rehung outside the store, but the cost of refurbishment was too great, and he himself closed Maurie’s in 2015.
In 2016, Mark and Lelonie Luft reopened Maurie’s for a few years, but the historic downtown business at last closed permanently in the summer of 2019. Soon after, the Maurie’s name and candy recipes were sold to the Association for the Developmentally Disabled of Woodford County, which operated Maurie’s of Eureka for a while. After Maurie’s moved to Eureka, the Central Illinois Good Safety Education Center was located at 522 Court St. for a couple years.
The latest chapter in the history of 522 and 522 ½ Court St. began on 4 Jan. 2021, when Johannes sold the former Maurie’s building to Haynes.
“Scott Johannes – I used to work with him at the hospital – made an awesome offer to me. I say it just fell into my lap. I couldn’t turn it down, but I was clueless with what I would be facing, especially since the building sat empty for almost two years. But loved it as soon as I walked in, mess and all,” Haynes said.
“At the beginning, we were really not sure exactly what Maddie Mae’s would be, and we are still working on that. I feel like Maddie Mae’s is a little Cracker Barrel: we have a lunchroom which is open 11-2 Wednesday-Saturday (we are still experimenting with our menu), then we have a room with food mixes and foods from many small businesses here in the states, then we carry greeting cards and have a small gift shop.
“Since the building sat empty for so long, we had to do a lot of upgrades, especially with the kitchen and heating and air. Where Maurie’s used to have their candy – in the U-shape – we are not allowed to put food in that room unless we were to rip up the carpet.
“We tried to use stuff that was left behind and up-do it. [One] cabinet . . . we were going to move, but they only took the floor up to it, not under it. The front had all of those vertical slats on the front. We were able to remove all (which we saved) except one. His daughter [Meta] said they held packs of cigarettes and that Maurie had that cabinet special made.”
